As the COVID-19 continues to spread (sadly), the world is adjusting to the new normal. While travel, aviation, hospitality, and other such industries have been affected, many startups and SaaS companies have become the must-use tools with social distance measures being put in place. Zendesk has done an interesting piece on how coronavirus has impacted customer service across various industries, while Techcrunch’s Josh Constine suggests that tech giants should offer “cloud relief” to small businesses by giving them deep discounts or deferring the payment schedules. Here’s what else deserves your attention in the world of SaaS.
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News of the week
Zoom discreetly sends user data to Facebook: report
While Zoom is the de facto choice for video calls for many, it may not be really privacy-friendly. As per a report, the app uses Facebook’s SDK and hence sends data to the social network without any mention in its terms and conditions. What’s more worrying is the fact that the data is shared for those users who don’t even have Facebook accounts.
Ant Financial announces SaaS version of database solution “OceanBase”
Alibaba’s OceanBase database boasts to be the fastest one around with the maximum processing capacity of 61 million times per second. While it has been used by the Chinese giant for its own e-commerce platform until now, the company is now bringing to the world as a SaaS offering.
Notarize to add 1,000 online notaries to address demand for remote transactions
With remote work becoming mainstream, Notarize, a platform that lets companies opt for digital notarizations, has announced the plans to add 1,000 notaries. The company is doing it to handle the demand, and claims that it’s also used for medical authorizations, along with real estate.
Investment quotient
Unlike traditional logging tools, Humio touts itself as an unlimited logging tool. And with a growth of 550 percent y-o-y, it seems to have got the attention of Dell Technologies Capital and Access as it has announced Series B funding of $20million. The company is building an index-free logging solution so that its clients can search for everything on a real-time basis.
Data protection is becoming a tricky subject as each country is having its own regulations (read CCPA vs GDPR). Hyperproof helps companies in being compliant with various privacy and data protection laws, and at the time when people are working remotely, its importance has increased. The startup has now raised $3million, taking its total funding to $6million.
Must-reads
Why Slack’s CEO says he’s not worried about Microsoft
Related tweetstorm: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/1243000487365861376
The new SaaS metric you should be tracking
7 amazingly effective lead nurturing tactics
What is customer retention? Why it’s important and 8 strategies to improve it
Listen to
There’s no denying that we’re living in challenging times, so this podcast comes across as a good way to understand how to navigate through them. Qordoba, an AI assistant writing software, has raised $21million to date from renowned investors. Its founder and CEO May Habib shares her journey, how to manage the company’s burn during tough situations, and how to boost team member’s morale among other things.
10 things we learned from season 8 of the BUILD podcast
We’ve featured OpenView’s BUILD podcast episodes in our SaaS weekly roundup quite often, and as its season 8 comes to an end, they’ve neatly summarized key learnings from various guests in one podcast. From marketing to sales, and from growth to content marketing – it’s a great podcast to get bite-sized nuggets of info.
Lessons from growing from $10M to $20M ARR in just 12 months with Mikael Thuneberg, Supermetrics
In this podcast, Supermetrics solo founder, Mikael Thuneberg, shares the growth journey of the company which aggregates analytics from various platforms into one place. He also reveals the marketing activities that are working for the company, and what exactly helped them to grow 100 percent y-o-y to $20million ARR.
Watch
From 1 to 14,000 customers: the survival guide to bootstrapping a SaaS – Omar Zenhom
In this video, Webinar Ninja’s Omar Zenhom talks about how he started his company in an unlikely way, and how he bootstrapped it while being profitable. He shares some interesting strategies to acquire customers, including podcasts, webinars, building relationships and so on.
SaaS Companies Response to Coronavirus (COVID-19)
OpenView has been a big proponent of product-led growth movement, and in this video, its partner Blake Bartlett shares instances of companies that are leveraging the COVID-19 situation as an opportunity. He gives examples of three companies: Zoom, Loom, and Slack.
